Someone has been reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion, and paid close attention to young colonel Fedmahn Cassad's intervention in Qom-Riyadh, as narrated in "The Soldier".

Just saying.

You have to admire the chutzpah of the IDF but by God they are irredeemable vengeful m0therf*ckers.

Yes, they are...

What's the mechanism that led to nearly simultaneous explosions of thousands of devices?

Physical introduction of explosive charges and triggers into the supply chain on such a scale seems unlikely. Reports in mainstream media focus on the possibility to trigger thermal runaway reaction in Li-ion batteries by malware. I am not sure I am buying this: thermal runaway occurs when the battery is physically damaged, e.g., punctured - this would require non-trivial physical interference which is, again, unlikely, nor is it a guarantee - or overcharging, which is unlikely to be triggered by malware only, IMHO, since the device must be charging in the first place, and most obviously weren't.

So, any ideas? Can some kind of malware that, say, causes a CPU to overheat cause the battery to blow up with high probability?

Regardless, and as an aside: anyone considering buying a Chinese (or any other) EV with Li-ion batteries should let a second thought at least begin to contemplate crossing his mind (with apologies to Douglas Adams for reusing the turn of phrase that is obviously his).

Given that neither the Hezbollah nor Hamas lack good engineers, there is no way samples of these pagers have not been disassembled and studied prior to distributing them.

My money is not only on physical introduction of explosive charges, but also on their obfuscation - probably as part of the battery. From there, it would be relatively easy to trigger it with a specific modulation/code or whatever. These things all blew up at the same time. You don't get there with thermal runaway only.

At this very moment, somewhere, someone, an already ex-importer is either slurping tequilas enjoying a new life, face and bank account, either running for their life, either slowly having their body temperature leveling with the ambient one.

The battery is certainly the obvious place. It's heavy so a little extra is less noticeable, or perhaps they just reduced the battery capacity. It could even be introduced without the complicity of the pager manufacturer - offer them a good deal on several thousand batteries and they might well take it.

I haven't seen anything indicating how they were triggered. If the software was compromised it could signal to the battery without the need for extra wiring, for example by a pattern of power use.

Have you seen the video? The pager exploded and blew out fragments.

If it turns out that the explosions were simultaneous, then that’s no component failure.

I’m far from an expert so this is total conjecture, but say the cpu cooked hot enough to combust the battery, there’d surely be a period of time before an explosion where the device was incredibly hot right? You’d assume most people would put it down? Seems as if they all went off very suddenly catching the users by surprise.

Thing is, you're assuming that the typical overvoltage/overcurrent protections were in place. Normally malware couldn't damage the battery because there are safeguards, but if they were intercepting the pagers during production they could disable them.

Speaking as someone that was an industrial chemist before I ended up in IT, the video doesn't look like a lithium explosion/fire to me. I would suspect an explosive.

I hope, for your sake, that remains true.

Lets do Tesla’s next!

That is the mother of all supply chain attacks. Solarwinds ain't got nothin on that.

Does Hezbollah have centralized pager procurement so that only Hezbollah members carry them or do innocent people also have them (seems so, if there's an eight-year-old girl killed)? Could they could all go up should the IDF want?

Funny that not so long ago I was heavily downvoted for saying that unfriendly state could install a backdoor in EV cars allowing it to remotely control the car causing it to crash or even cause battery to catch fire.

That combined with ability to know the location of the car could prove an effective avenue to exploit if suddenly we found ourselves to be at war.

I think there should be more regulation when it comes to importation of such cars.

One being that the government should have full access to the firmwares and the cars should be programmed in the UK.

You got downvoted because, like all your posts, it was unintelligible garbage. Yet again, you miss the point. Loads of recently purchased pagers which were not on charge suddenly blew up (not overheated, not started thermal runaway, they exploded) ALL AT THE SAME TIME. This might even allow you to understand the hardware on these NEW pagers had been interfered with

Isn’t there an article about Raspberry Pi’s that you want to go post some weird stuff against??

Your point is?

I agree there is a potential threat there.

I don't exactly see how "giving the government full access" is a fix. The proposal is essentially to make sure only good, homegrown, domestic backdoors and supply chain exploits exist? Because that's what will happen.

Domestic or not, patriotic "good guys" or not, a door is a door.

Let end users have full access to the source. But no, everyone will hate that, it's about control, not about "whether it's secure".

Yes, backdoors will exist one way or another, but surely it is better have "our" backdoors than from an unfriendly state.

You can also mitigate the risk by having independent reviews of what goes in.

End users will not have access to the source. You don't want people to turn their cars into missiles after following a tutorial on TikTok.

You probably got down voted (going by this post) for either Xenophobia and / or naivety.

The first part is reasonable in that it's true they can be hacked.

But saying that we should ban imports and trust the UK government, boy that's scary.

For starters, they would be amongst the first allowing remote take over of cars "to stop terrorism and child molesters". You can guarantee the access it will be shared with the usual suspects"

So sure say we should keep an eye on it, but I would trust anyone really.

Now that's some proper gaslighting here.

Of course, comrade, it is better that cars are programmed at unfriendly country. There is totally nothing that can go wrong. We should trust them.

This is not proper to EVs - every car with a full set of driver assistance features sold today would be hackable and very, very, crashable.

Throttle by wire to accelerate, GPS location to know when you're in the correct sharp turn, then use the emergency stability system to lock say just the two right or two left wheels for a second, and your car goes wherever it needs to go to transform it into a flying car for a few seconds.

EV batteries are but a nice addition to this cocktail, which can increase the lethality from say 200% to 500% - all good and dandy, it's above 100%.

Adding EV batteries in the current discussion would be supposing there would be an implanted explosive charge in the batteries - which, if it could be a thing, could very well be implanted in a gas tank as well.

very well be implanted in a gas tank as well.

Not remotely the same thing.

The only difference, so far as I can see, is that a petrol tank aka "gas tank" can be more easily inspected. Battery packs are sealed at the manufacturer (usually a different manufacturer to the car) and are fairly difficult to dismantle.

This has nothing to do with batteries per se, more to do with blindly trusting imported black-box tech.

Probably downvoted now, and in the past, because the average car has enough security holes to not need malicious people from an unfriendly state to install backdoors. Wasn't there a demonstration not so long ago of some researchers hijacking a "smart"(ish) vehicle simply by driving up beside it?

As for thinking that giving the government access to anything would be useful, think again. Their approach to dealing with "cyber" problems is the ICO, an outfit that isn't even worthy of having it's name spoken out loud, they're that useless.

And no, the government wouldn't bodge things because "think of the children" as was mentioned in another reply, because it's the government we're talking about. How soon, would you imagine, until the entire source code of all the firmware in all of the UK cars ends up on a USB key that was "mislaid" on the 10.40 to Penzance? Still, that's better, I suppose, than expecting some random minister (any of them) from having the slightest clue when it comes to computers. To give you an example of the utter technological cluelessness, here's a headline from 2018: Over 24,000 attempts to access porn sites from parliamentary computers since election

Wow people still use pagers?

Sorry but someone using a pager in this day and age feels bizzare.

What is not bizarre is someone who writes but doesn't read...

They switched to pagers because of concerns their phones would be too easy to hack.

I guess being the only people on the planet who still buy pagers makes you susceptible to identifying your supply chain.

Fun fact*: At one point the NHS owned 10% of the world‘s pagers.

*disputed but not disproven AFAIK.

next rocket-firing cigarettes ? JB 007 YOLT

Unlikely, but I am going to be a lot more suspicious about vapes in future!

I noticed recently that some disposables have a suspiciously large amount of electronics i.e. what looks a microcontroller (qfn24 package, no part number, natch, but identical package to many esp32 chips), soic8 (flash chip?), digital microphone (well, they use microphones as a vacuum sensor, but no reason why this one couldn't listen if it has a microcontroller) as well as what looks suspiciously like a PCB antenna. This is in addition to the usual charge control ic and transistors.

The vape in question is an "IVG Air 2400" if anyone else would like to take a look!

Battery looks normal but it is far bigger than it needs to be!

Makes me feel like a paranoid nutjob that I even bothered to look, but this recent news from Lebanon is.. Worrying.